Whoa. STAR WARS EPISODE 7 Will Focus on Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia

This is a terrible idea, for roughly 900,000 reasons.

#1. Demystifying. Han Solo’s new persona, Luke’s future, the immediate aftermath of the death of the Emperor…these all had an element of undefined mystery at the end of that film. To see what happens when you oversaturate a character and bend them to fit within your new idea rather than allow them to enjoy their mystery, see Yoda in the prequels.

Yoda in Empire: Wars not make one great.
Yoda brought back: If so powerful you are…why leave?
Yoda in Empire: Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter.
Yoda brought back: Concentrate all your fire on the nearest starship.

This change goes beyond Lucas’s garbage writing. In order to fit him into the story CURRENTLY being told, Yoda’s character had to be changed in a way that was detrimental to our perception of him. And you can argue that a better writer can avoid that, but Abrams last geek-fest project was Star Trek, where he turned every single character into a caricature of themselves so that he could streamline his story.

Get what I’m saying? BENT them in order to fit the story CURRENTLY being told.

#2: It favors nostalgia over novelty. Nostalgia is good for stretching a known product’s life out a bit, but not for producing something new that is going to be long-lived or meaningful.

The best thing Star Wars could do right now is the same thing they did in the first place: utilize a wonderfully expansive, well-crafted universe as a backdrop for a bout of engaging storytelling, centered around a set of new and interesting characters who are disenfranchised and whose successes we can get caught up in. The worst thing they could do is exactly what they ARE doing: respond to the audience’s sense of drought by calling the flood…gathering together old ideas and a geriatric cast for an overwhelming volume of momentarily-amusing trips down memory lane, knowing full well that such a journey will ultimately fail to maintain the remaining value of the franchise and leave everybody with something of a lasting, lingering Star Wars hangover.

#3: Falling over yourself to reference the old makes the new really, really stupid. Remember how someone thought it would be cool to see Yoda in action training young Jedi, but at the same time it was deemed important to include as many reference points as possible to the old films. So you had the very silly “public school-style Jedi Academy, with 20 kids holding baby
lightsabers and wearing blast shields as they swing at floating robot balls” thing. Hell, even the Jedi robes were silly. Apparently, instead of Obi Wan wearing them as a reasonably logical disguise as he hit in the desert, they were just ordinary Jedi attire. So he was hiding on a planet Darth Vader knew he had visited before, dressed as…himself.

#4: JJ Abrams doesn’t always “get it.” This IS the guy who commented repeatedly that he wanted his next Star Trek movie to be more Dark Knight inspired…and the result was literally just that he put the word “Darkness” in the title and…I guess maybe that’s it. He has also illustrated a keen eye for the iconic cultural footprints of a series, and a complete inability to recognize anything that isn’t surface-level and loud. The stories in his Stark Trek movies also had brutally lame storytelling shortcuts that had no reason to exist…things that could have been worked around and/or fixed with just the smallest investment in creativity…and (here’s the real problem, I suppose) failed completely to add anything new or give the universe any direction whatsoever. NEW is really what both Trek and Wars need. They need it bad. And even if you did like those two movies (sigh), then all you’ve really got are two enjoyable nostalgia-heavy movies and a franchise that is still running on old creative fumes.

I’ll stop there, but let me say: you can credit Abrams with a lot of different qualities…he won’t be sitting on his ass with his coffee shooting three fucking movies worth of shot/reverse-shot against a green screen, for one thing (GAHH!!!). He builds sets and has his actors run through them, he can make a shot with 10% of the visual artistry of any scene in the prequels pop in a way they never, ever do, and he knows just the right spot in an action sequence to fit the joke in.

But he isn’t an ideas man. He’s no inventor. He’s a curator of the past…good at cleaning the thing up, you know, and making it shine, and creating a provocative display that really captures its appeal. But you still end up admiring it the way you admire something that is firmly a part of the past, and as new as it may look for that brief moment…

…it belongs in a museum.